Windows gets stuck at restarting screen
Useful steps (always good to check first):
- Disconnect peripherals and cold restart.
- Turn off computer, disconnect power cord and restart after a few minutes.
Solution without using a recovery disk:
- Restart computer and press F8 several times to enter Safe Boot Menu. If F8 key has no effect, force-restart your computer 5 times.
- Select Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > System Restore.
- Select a good known restore point and click Restore.
Solution using a recovery disk:
- Plug an empty USB flash drive (> 4 GB) into a healthy computer.
- Prepare a recovery disk using Microsoft Media Creation Tool [1].
- Plug the USB drive into the frozen computer.
- You may have to tell the BIOS to boot from USB disk.
- Restart computer. Windows Setup will show up from USB drive.
- Select your language, keyboard layout and click Next.
- Click "Repair Windows" (but not "Install Windows").
- Select Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > System Restore.
- Select a good known restore point and click Restore.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
I had Windows 2012 R2 stuck at reboot with the spinner spinning with the screen pictured in the question. The way I got into this state was I clicked the Reboot/Restart button in Windows Update and then responded “Yes” to the prompt of whether it was OK to restart even though other users were logged in. Then it displayed the “Restarting” screen forever. I think it was confused, it was supposed to show me if I wanted to close my apps first before proceeding but was instead showing the Rebooting screen forever.
I was accessing the server via mstsc (RDP), so to get out of this situation, I pressed ctrl+alt+end (which is like pressing ctrl+alt+del on the remote computer). This came up with the security options display. I then clicked on “Sign out”. This caused the screen to display “Signing out…” for a few seconds before showing me the prompt of whether or not I wanted to save my files or Restart anyway. I clicked Restart anyway to proceed.
After that, Server signed me out. When I logged back in, I saw that the server uptime was still more than a couple minutes. So I initiated a reboot again and it finally went -_-.
Nothing worked on my computer. Just had the little circle going around. Control Alt delete did nothing. I pushed the power button and it seemed to shut down but when restarting it just came back, that little circle with the word "restarting ". I shut down again then pulled the battery. Put the battery back in and it started normally.